Screenshot: DuckTales/Disney+
We say we hate reboots. We’ll happily go on and on about how we’d much rather have something newer, fresher, more original. And yet—remakes and re-dos remain reliably big business.
In fairness, it’s been this way from the beginning, with film producers mining books and plays for ideas more frequently than pursuing new ideas. It’s pure economics: Movies are expensive, and past success hints at the promise of future success. It’s easy to forget that that the 1939 Wizard of Oz was the fourth film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 book; those concepts had been floating around for almost four decades before Judy Garland ever put on the silver ruby slippers.
It might not be in quite the same league as that classic, but the CW just provided details on the forthcoming reboot of the mid-aughts cult series The 4400, the new version being cleverly differentiated from the original by dropping the article. (The network has had success over the last few years rebooting shows from Charmed, to Walker, to Roswell and Kung Fu.) And then there’s the matter of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, the second trailer for which just dropped, promising a much more dramatically satisfying version of the novel than David Lynch was able to manage in the ‘80s.
Why do we continue to revisit worlds we’ve already explored? It can’t all be chalked up to Hollywood’s lack of imagination—this is on us, too. And in fact, there are those reboots and remakes that are just about as good as the originals and, just occasionally, even better. Here are some of our favorites. What about yours?
